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It surprises me how many leaders don’t spend enough time thinking about their legacy – what they will leave behind for the organization and the people they serve. Webster’s dictionary defines legacy as, “anything handed down from the past, as from an ancestor or predecessor.” Legacy is not bound by age or time served. Legacy represents your body of work at each stage of your career as you establish the foundational building blocks and accumulate the required wisdom to contribute to growth, innovation and opportunity both in and outside of the workplace. Your legacy grows with each new experience, with each previously untested idea and bold ideal that you are courageous enough to deploy, and each time you inspire others to see something through to fruition.

For many, leaving a legacy is associated with the end rather than the beginning or the next phase in one’s career. Your leadership is not shaped and your legacy is not defined at the end of the road but rather by the moments shared, the decisions made, the actions taken, and even the mistakes overcome throughout the many phases of your career. Leadership done rightly is a reinvention process – a continuous discovery that informs your mindset, new skill sets and aptitudes. At each stage of your career, you learn how to keep creating sustainable impact and influence. With each step you take, you will identify new ways of mastering the fundamentals, which in turn provides you with greater clarity and depth of thought to further improve your leadership approach and communication style.

To date, I’ve experienced five significant phases in my career; this series of legacy stages has guided my leadership journey and shaped the leader that I am today – just as much as the mentors who taught me about the importance of legacy. I’ve been able to use the five phases of my career thus far as milestones to measure my progress and maintain strategic focus on my leadership trajectory. As part of this process, I’ve remained in close contact with those people who played important roles in my leadership growth and experienced it at each stage of my career to remind myself of how I’ve matured and course-corrected my way along this journey.

If you were to leave your current line of work today, what is the legacy you would leave behind? How would others define it? Are you paying attention to the feedback and how it can guide the next phase of your career and your ability to influence others?

If you were to evaluate the last 10 years of your career and its various stages, what is the story you would tell others about your legacy? If others told the story, would the same narrative hold true? Based on the narrative, what would the next 10 years look like? What would you change or do differently?

The best leadership legacies are a consequence of success coming to those who are surrounded by people that want their success to continue. When you can inspire those around you to take a leap of faith with you, you are creating a legacy defining moment in your leadership career. Whenever you have this opportunity, embrace it. Capture the moment and appreciate the inherent responsibility associated with it to guide and shape the overall experience. After the moment subsides, share the significance with your team and how it plays an important part of their legacy, too.

Here is another perspective you can get: review your resume and describe the legacy you left behind at each job. The legacies you can more easily define are related to those jobs that mattered most to you. They were more purposeful because you could contribute in meaningful ways that also inspired those around you. When you find it a challenge to identify your legacy, that particular job had less importance and impact on your career; in many cases, it may have taken you a step backward in your leadership progression, causing an awakening and a course correction to get your career moving forward again.

To help guide your sustainable success as a leader and keep you moving in the right direction, here are five stages of legacy building that will define the significance of your leadership:

1. Identity and Values

You must know and be extremely connected with who you are and what you represent as an individual and a leader. What are the values and beliefs that influence how you lead, your behavior and your attitude? Do others know the real you and what you represent as a leader for the betterment of a healthier whole?

Many would argue that Steve Jobs was in constant search until he discovered his own personal identity and value system. As it was captured by Walter Isaacson in Steve Jobs’ biography, Jobs seemed to be in a constant treasure hunt for personal identity and this influenced many of his ideas and ideals. In many respects, Jobs was connecting the dots of his genius as a forward-thinking innovator throughout the various stages of his career.

2. Guiding Foundational Principles

Once you have been able to solidify your identity and set of values, how do they translate into a set of guiding principles that others can begin to expect from you? These principles should represent your most enduring ideas and ideals and set the tone for your performance expectations as a leader.

Former General Electric CEO Jack Welch was known for growing fast in the slow-growth economy of the 1980’s by eradicating perceived inefficiencies, trimming inventories and dismantling bureaucracy. Welch's guiding foundational principle was that a company should be either No. 1 or No. 2 in their particular industry, or else they should leave it completely. This approach and mindset was later adopted by other CEOs across corporate America.